A DISTURBING PROTEST

Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin reciting the Pledge of  Allegiance

        Tea Party spokesperson Senator Ted Cruz (Rep., Texas) and former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin joined a group of veterans who were protesting the closing of World War II Memorial in Washington yesterday. The boisterous demonstrators broke through the barriers and carried them off to the White House, where they flaunted a Confederate flag, as they denounced President Obama for shutting down the national parks, an action for which Senator Cruz and his party were themselves  responsible when they shut down the entire government! They criticize the park rangers for simply doing their job —without pay!
        That kind of blatant hypocrisy is what infuriates fair-minded Americans and has resulted in the deservedly high disapproval ratings of the Republican party. As a World War II veteran myself, I’m embarrassed and ashamed that some (not all) of my fellow veterans could be so ill-informed about what’s going on, not to mention their being so disrespectful to their commander-in-chief.
        Cruz and Palin were followed at the microphone by Larry Klayman, founder of the ultra conservative political advocacy organization Freedom Watch. Klayman told the crowd that our country is now “ruled by a president who bows down to Allah,” and he called upon his hearers to join him in waging “a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come up with his hands out.”  I’m sure he meant to say “come out with his hands up”!
        I don’t know if Senator Cruz was there to hear Klayman’s racist remarks, but when asked for his reaction, Cruz’s response, unlike that of some of his Republican counterparts, was anything but a denunciation.  Republican Scott Rigell of Virginia, for example, emphatically repudiated Klayman’s comments and called them harmful to the country.
        As disgusted as I am with Confederate flag-waving racists, I am even more repulsed by American flag-waving bigots, whose attitudes and actions are a disgrace to our flag and to the country for which it stands.